The moral and the political are twisted together in all this like a torqued Moebius-strip: we define our political duties toward others or our rights of expectation from them in terms of the highest moral values and obligations and principles conceivable to us. But these highest moral values etc. are themselves ideologically stunted things, a bonsai-ethos that has been deformed by the contraceptive culture of the democratist Many. Do human beings have a positive and universally recognizable right to be left alone as ingrown idiotes, as self-gratifying swinish consumers, as pathetic sacks of illusions and delusions? Are ultimate rights something that the least cultured and least reflective are fit to define for themselves, much less for everyone in general? Can any civilization afford to leave its most vital principles to be framed and legislated by the least philosophically aware? When a society organizes the entire thrust of its energies and institutions to mass-produce such obtuse types, and when malleable human nature makes this organized stupefaction all too easy and efficient, how can any mere exceptional individuals do anything about such a Malthusian dynamic?

But for the Jews this moral-spiritual issue raises the same societal problem it does for the Greeks: how can a man have the "right" to make himself spiritually or rationally destitute or retarded when this corrupts the whole quality of the culture that we all together need and depend on? If anyone wants a cloistered and closed-minded life, an anti-aristic life, let him either go off and live among the wolves--or else join the community of like-minded idiots that (alas) compose and define the basic terms of modern society.

To the Greeks not just slaves had to be excluded from the democratic franchise and public debate but also merchants, bankers, all money-grubbing banausoi, because any society stupid enough to entrust its ultimate values to be determined by the caste of utilitarians deserves fully what it gets. It would be like entrusting our sports to couch potatoes and paraplegics. Such a foolish society would get what we have in fact got, a civilization too fucking stupid to realize how hard cultural, political, spiritual and philosophical cripples labor to cripple everyone else to become just like them.

Human life is an extension of the principles of nature, and human civilization is a venture extrapolated out of human natures: man and his natural potential are the root of the entire human domain. The great task of all philosophizing is to become competent to interpret and steer the potential developmental forces in human natures and in the human condition, both of which are prodigiously fatalistic.

Art or culture or philosophy must ply its genius today against this most prodigious opponent in all of history-human self-obliviousness, man's deific powers of denial and delusion, the nescience buried in the heart of science. Art must keen its scalpel for one sure incision, it must razor the bladder of an inflationary corpus of hypertrophic beliefs so deftly that the violence is only felt after the fact. Delusion must be lanced like a boil bloated to purple distension: art is not the play of pretty illusions-entertainment is that whoring pastime-but rather righteous and wise disillusion, judicious severing of a malignancy. Art is far from amoral; it is in crusade against lying and trivializing conventional morality and must transcend that snakepit of corruption, certainly; but amoral it is not, in no way is it free to be neutral and objective. Art is either the lancet of a higher truth, a law superior to any of man's pleasant and flattering rhetorical reasonings, or else it has no authority, no right to command anyone's attention. Art traffics with the divine, that is, the hidden or occult, the mythic, which is after all of the very essence of man, the stuff his character and even his life are ultimately woven from. A wise society knows to have contempt for egomaniacal poseurs playing onanistically with art supplies, and a foolish society imagines that "art is whatever artists may do."

It is a double-edged makeshift to entrust an individual or a group of individuals with the authority to resort to violence. The enticement implied is too tempting for a human being. The men who are to protect the community against violent aggression easily turn into the most dangerous aggressors. They transgress their mandate. They misuse their power for the oppression of those whom they were expected to defend against oppression. The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty. The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek πόλις [city-state] down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders.

Call it the fault of civilization.God isn't compatible with macinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilizaition has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness. That's why I have to keep these books locked up in the safe. They're smut. People would be shocked if...

Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success.